The present invention relates to a system for printing and copying color and monochrome (e.g., black-and-white) documents. In particular, the invention provides pre-collated color sheets and an instruction sheet that allow a user to easily program a monochrome photocopier to insert the color sheets into their proper position in a final mixed document that includes the color sheets and copies of the monochrome sheets.
Photocopiers and color printers have become an indispensable part of most offices, and are becoming increasingly popular for personal use as well. Color printers, including laser printers, can provide high quality text and graphic images on various document substrates, including paper and transparencies. Moreover, recently digital document processing systems, which employ both printing and photocopying capabilities, have become popular.
However, such systems have a relatively high per-page operating cost. In practice, a user may wish to print and photocopy a document that has mostly black-and-white pages, and only a few color pages. For example, in a document such as a report or business plan, color pages may be used for the cover page, the first page of the different sections in the report, and for various graphs which are interspersed among a large number of black-and-white text pages. Accordingly, it is inefficient to photocopy such a document on a color photocopier when most of the pages in the document are black-and-white. It is also inefficient to print one or more copies of such a document on a printer with color and monochrome printing capabilities.
In particular, depending on the arrangement made by the user, a document processing system may have a counter that maintains a count of the total number of color and black-and-white copied pages and the user is billed according to this count.
In contrast, conventional black-and-white photocopiers can produce a large number of photocopies very economically. However, of course, such photocopiers cannot provide color documents.
If a user desires to print several sets of a document, where the document includes both black-and-white and color pages, the user may print out one complete document, remove the black-and-white pages, and photocopy these pages to provide the necessary number of sets of black-and-white pages. Additionally, the user can print out a corresponding number of sets of the color pages, and manually collate the color pages with the black-and-white pages to form the final sets of documents. However, this procedure is time consuming, tedious and error-prone.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a system for easily and economically forming several sets of documents where each document includes both black-and-white and color pages. The system should be compatible with existing color printers and black-and-white photocopiers.
The present invention provides a system having the above and other advantages.